Mediating ningen kankei: Gender, intimacy, and consumption in the production of shojo manga.

摘要

This dissertation examines the confluence of popular culture production and gendered notions of consumption in postwar Japan. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Tokyo, I focus on the production of girls' comics (shojo manga) within the top four manga publishing houses in Japan (Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan, and Hakusensha). In Japan, manga comprise approximately 30% of all publications and have become the backbone of contemporary popular culture, supplying stories for television, movies, video games, and even novels, art, and theater. Within this, shojo manga is a subgenre, but one which has been seminal both to manga itself and to girls' culture throughout the postwar era. By focusing on the ningen kankei (human relations) at work in the production of manga at multiple levels (text, magazines, personnel, and industry), I examine the concrete ways that shojo manga reflect, refract, and fabricate constructions of gender, consumption, and intimacy. Through an analysis of representations of gender and sexuality in shojo manga in the nineties, as well as the extra-manga content of shojo manga magazines, such as reader's pages and artists' contests, I argue that it is precisely through gendered content and narratives of human relations that girls are interpellated into their role as consumers. Moreover, my research demonstrates that in the new millennium the very vision of consuming schoolgirls has become paradigmatic of relations of production in contemporary capitalism in Japan. Furthermore, I use the concept of affective labor to complicate the binary between producers and consumers that has been the mainstay of media theory. I posit that editors and artists who grew up reading manga approach the products they create, the wider medium, and their readers through a more intimate lens, melding conceptions of human relations and labor along gendered lines. Finally, I argue that this is in part a function of the way that culture industries work in today's form of media-saturated and media-savvy global capitalism. Thus, this dissertation utilizes the shojo manga industry as a nodal point through which to explore postwar cultural production, mass media, and gender in relation to production and consumption in contemporary Japan.